The Drug Attention Education Industrial Complex

• In Event: Critical Pedagogy in the Age of AI: Education, Power, and Politics of New Technologies

Abstract

Drugs are at the center of the most significant transformations of schooling. For the past two decades, with the dominance of the standards and accountability movement and business models of school reform, children have been drugged to compete on standardized tests, for greater attention in school, and have been diagnosed with ADHD at exponentially increasing rates. As screens have become ubiquitous for kids both in and out of schools, crises of “attention deficit” have expanded. Pharmaceutical stimulant solutions and digital technology products in resilience are at the ready to be used against screen addiction. As trans athletes have reached greater prominence and inclusion in school sports, they and their hormones have become the targets of campaigns of hate by the political right. As diagnoses of anxiety and trauma among youth have reached epidemic proportions, prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs have reached new highs. And as illicit drugs go mainstream and are legalized, illegal drugs remain at the center of the targeting of black and brown youth by the juvenile justice school to prison pipeline. What these seemingly disparate examples have in common are vast interlocked drug and attention industries in commercializing and producing youth problems for profit. This paper provides an overview of the material stakes in the education drug attention education complex: educational profiteering through the mutually supportive sales of drugs and testing products, drugs and digital screen technologies, drugs and trauma/ resilience programs, and drugs and juvenile justice services. The contest for students’ attention, consciousness, and bodies needs to be understood as part of the global agenda of the transnational capitalist class to produce differentiated workers, to contain excess surplus labor through technologies of control, and to depoliticize the potentially explosive class relations of an economic and educational system that depends upon increasing repression. This contest involves the ways that pharma and digital technologies work in relation to each other to manage biological and psychological stimulation and excitation, banality, and drudgery, producing “enchantments” and “disenchantments” with lived experience. The paper argues that the media screen disenchantment of lived experience and the drudgery of transmission pedagogy can be countered through the enchantment of agency that comes through critical pedagogical practice.

Author

• Kenneth Saltman, University of Illinois at Chicago